It's another one from the twisted and brilliant imagination of London's Miss Cakehead: diners were given surgical gowns and gloves, and feasted on trompe l'oeil dishes the they dug out of a rib-cage that appeared to be connected to a screaming victim.

The pizza cake started off as a thought-experiment, entered into a competition -- but now it is a reality that you can prepare at home (but probably shouldn't). Here's the original, which was apparently ripped off by Pillsbury.

The Horse Collar is a $20 monster kielbasa sold at the Green Bay Packers' Lambeau Field, intended for consumption by two persons ("If you can tackle this one alone, you're a champ" -Lambeau Field executive chef Heath Barbato).

Annabel de Vetten at Conjurer's Kitchen baked a cake that shows off the beating heart and living guts lurking under the prettily decorated surfaces of those multi-tier cakes we display for special occasions.

Firebox's £35 monkey brains bowl doesn't go in the microwave or dishwasher, but it is, technically, food-safe. I'm thinking expensive, Maharajah of Pankot-themed pen pot (though you'll have to figure out what to do with the lid).

Red Shoes is a welcome addition to Fantich & Young's Apex Predator sculptures (previously) in which shoe-soles are studded with false teeth in a wonderfully gross echo of hyperdontia (warning, a bit icky). This seems like the kind of thing you could do yourself with some Sugru and some old dentures. In fact, I may have to give it a go.
(via Crazy Abalone)

By photoshopping a pair of mirror-flipped profile-shots of your face onto either side of a full-on shot, you can make a gimmicked photo that, when curled and placed in a jar of water, creates a convincing illusion of your head in a jar. Mikeasaurus's Instructable has easy-to-follow instructions for making your own.

Makeup artist Psycho Sandra created an amazing, gross-out effect for her Hallowe'en costume last year: she created the illusion that she had made a domino mask of her own flayed skin. She's got a whole gallery of bloody makeup effects on her site, including a crazy zombie to die (and come back) for.

A
case study in the New England Journal of Medicine details the tragic story of an electrician who received a shock of 14,000V and was blinded as part of his injuries. Accompanying the article is this striking photo of the scars on his eyes, which resemble the plasma ball effects, the sort of thing you'd expect from a science fiction movie.

Natalie is the proprietor of Austin's Side Serf Cakes. When she married Dave, they had a "Til Death Do Us Part"-themed wedding, whose centerpiece was this amazing cake that resembled their severed heads on a platter.

Singaporean macrofocus photographer Nicky Bay produces wonderful portraits of insects in their natural setting. Particularly fascinating are the photos of bugs eating each other, particularly the shot above of an assassin bug (Acanthaspis sp.) which "decorate themselves with the corpses of their consumed prey," forming a protective "meat-shield" as well as offering olfactory and visual camouflage to help it infiltrate ant-nests.

This video was made by the University of Utah Brain Institute to teach medical students about what a brain looks and feels like before it gets preserved in formalin and takes on the texture of a hard rubber ball.

The big takeaway message: Your brain is seriously squishy. So squishy, in fact, that a finger can dent it. As professor Suzanne Stensaas explains, this is one of the reasons why cerebrospinal fluid is so important. Your brain has to float in that fluid. If it didn't, it would come to rest against the side of your hard skull and quickly end up deformed.

Behold! Dudefood's oreo-breaded deep-fried ice-cream, produced by de-cremeing a bunch of oreo-style cookies, pulverizing their carapaces, mashing the creme in with cookies-and-cream ice-cream, emballing the adulterated ice-cream, rolling the balls in the powdered husks, and deep frying the lot.

This 1863 image from the Wellcome Trust illustrates a distinctly vampiric set of "Syphilitic malformations of the permanent teeth" -- makes you wonder if the visual image of the vampire was inspired by the widespread horrors of untreated syphilis (for an exceptionally visceral window into a society wracked by untreated syphilis, have a look at the Mutter Museum's display of syphilitic skulls).

Perhaps you've heard tell of Krokodil, an injectable street-drug popular in Russia that causes your skin to go green and scaly and eventually to rot off all the way to the bone at injection sites, and gives its habitual users permanent slurred speech and jerky motions, earning it the nickname of the "zombie drug?" Phoenix poison-control centers now report that they're treating krokodil users, suggesting that the practice of using the drug recreationally is has begun to spread to American shores. A Google Image search for "krokodil" will supply you with ample nightmare fuel for years to come.

Miss Cakehead writes, "A macbre preview of some 'treats' which will be sold in Miss Cakehead's infamous Eat Your Heart Out Halloween pop up cake shop in London - the theme for 2013 being 'Feed The Beast'. Undoubtably these rum filled chocolate body parts make the world's most disturbing liqueur chocolates, and there is much much worse to come!"

A bar in the Yukon needs to source a new human toe, because a patron ate the one they used to use as a cocktail garnish.

The sourtoe cocktail was legendary at the Downtown Hotel in Dawson City. Over 52,000 people have drunk cocktails garnished with toes at the bar, and were on notice that they faced a $500 fine if they swallowed the toe. But two weeks ago, a mysterious stranger stepped into the bar, ordered the sourtoe, drank it down, toe and all, plunked $500 on the bar, and walked out into the night.

Monster and Chips is a compulsively readable, delightfully illustrated series of novels for young readers that are full of good-natured gross-out humor and suspenseful scenarios. Joe stumbles into Fuzzby Bixington's Monster Diner one day while running away from the school bully and is adopted as a general dogsbody and sous-chef. In volume one, Monster and Chips, Joe discovers all manner of monstrous culinary secrets that he and his friends -- Barry, a wisecracking, tentacled, four-eyed "cat"; and Twig, a young, sweet tree-monster -- use to help Fuzzby compete on Monsterchef, where he faces a villainous, cheating horror of a monster. In volume two, Night of the Living Bread, a series of short episodes culminate with Fuzzy, Joe and friends cooking the Pizza of Ultimate Darkness to feed the dread Night-Mayor at his secretive annual feast.

University of Guelph researcher Emma Allen-Vercoe and her team have devised a method for creating artificial poop for use in fecal transplants, a promising therapy for people whose intestinal flora have been damaged by illness, antibiotics, or other therapies. The recipe involves a combination of indigestible cellulose and a starter culture of fecal bacteria. These are mixed in an airtight chamber and passed through a "robogut" -- a mechanical analog of the human digestive system that produces the finished turd.